Astronomy Day

We are blessed with very dark skies in this part of the Ozarks, but my own acreage has grown up with trees and I've been too lazy to find a perfect site for observational astronomy. As a result my telescopes have languished with only light use in the past few years, but day before yesterday I resolved to begin changing all that.

For one thing there was a rare daytime occultation of Venus by the thin crescent Moon. I set up my 4-inch refractor in the yard and struggled for a good, long time with the challenge of trying to find the dim crescent in the bright daytime sky. But eventually I was crowned with success and snapped the following photos with my cell phone held up to the lens of the telescope.

Later that night my friend Gordon came over for a crash course in basic observational astronomy. We set up my 8-inch reflector in a nearby field and struggled a bit with navigation through the night sky. (I'm sadly out-of-practice and I also need to spend a couple of hours improving the set-up and aim of the 50 mm finder scope). By late evening, however, Orion was well up in the sky and yielded spectacular views of its famous nebula and its showy double stars. And just as we were packing up Gemini was rising and the meteors of the up-coming shower peak were sporadically streaking overhead. 

One rarely gets such warm temperatures with such clear skies in December.